What Facebook’s new Reply function means for brands

HEUREKA editorial29 March 2013

Facebook has announced a new “Reply” feature to help brands manage their conversations more effectively. The move will help brands to improve the quality of the conversation and should lead to higher engagement for brand-page posts. This direct engagement with consumers will also be helpful when posters move off-topic or become unruly. Facebook has also said it will down rank those frequently marked as spammers.

The Replies function is automatically available for Page Admins and public figures with 10,000 followers or more. It allows them to click a “Reply” button, which sits alongside the “Like” button to respond directly to an individual comment and engage in a branched-off discussion.

Engage in direct conversations

The most active and engaging conversations will surface to the top of the post thread in order of relevance to each viewer – for example, if a member has a connection to participants on the thread, or there is high number of likes. For brands this means that useful and interesting information will be more prominent to its fans.

But don’t worry if you have less than 10,000 fans, you’ll still be able to opt into the new feature through your admin page by going to your “manage permissions” section where you will see a prompt to turn replies on.

Once you opt-in, you will be able to opt-out but all Pages will have the feature enabled on July 10, 2013. Pages that are already using this feature include Red Bull, Angry Birds, and The Huffington Post. You can join them too and find more here…

Facebook says that although this feature is only available on desktop at the moment, there are plans to roll it out to Graph API and mobile in the future.